


Day Comes Up New

by melannen



Category: Star Trek - Various Authors, Star Trek: Rihannsu - Diane Duane, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: F/M, Gen, Politics, Pregnancy, Rihannsu, Romulan wine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:55:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21842557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen
Summary: "I have done something spectacularly stupid," Arrhae said.
Comments: 17
Kudos: 57
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Day Comes Up New

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sheliak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheliak/gifts).



Arrhae thanked the door-opener and stepped into the private office of Ael i-Mheissan t'Rlaillieu, she who had once been commander of the Warbird _Bloodwing_

" _Llei’hmne_ ," Arrhae said, and bowed deeply. It was the most formally respectful she could be - one of the bows that had become part of the new courtesy building around the Two Worlds' new way of being, and that had become, for those who knew the Empress well, as much a way of teasing Ael as honoring her - and as much a way of honoring her as teasing her. "Thank you for agreeing to see me."

" _Deihu_ , I will always hear you," Ael said, answering formality with formality, but then she frowned. "And I thought I had finally broken you of the 'madam's in private. Have a seat, and end the bowing. What has become of 'Ael'? I am sure I had it from you yesterday."

"Madam, the difference is that yesterday I did not have to come before you and confess that I have done something spectacularly stupid." Arrhae sat in the chair across from her Empress's and looked down at her hands.

Ael gave her a second, and then said, "Is your _mnhei'sahe_ well?"

Arrhae nodded, quickly. "Yes, for now. Except perhaps in some small personal ways, that I hope I have made right on my own. But I do not know how long it may hold." That this was the first question the Empress had asked, Arrhae though, was yet again evidence that they had made the right choice in elevating her. She looked her Empress and friend in the eyes, this time. "Ael, I am pregnant."

 _That_ , Arrhae thought with a grim sort of triumph, had stopped her for real, though not for very long. "I had thought," Ael said softly, "that, certain deeply unlikely scions of Surak aside, you would not be cross-fertile with one of our people. Not without a great deal of effort on the part of many medical personnel."

"Empress, I still believe that to be true," Arrhae said. Being placed undercover by Starfleet intelligence as a member of an entirely different species ought to have made unexpected pregnancy the least of her worries. "And besides that, we are given, of course, a long-term contraceptive treatment before any kind of deep-cover mission."

"How long is long-term?" asked Ael.

"Less than ten years, it would seem," she said. "But the mission was never meant to last so long, and Makkhoi must not have even considered the need for a supplementary dose."

"So," said Ael. "You have not been among your Terran kin much of late, unless there is a diplomatic mission on-planet of which I have not been informed."

"Not unless I haven't been informed either," Arrhae said. Which left only one ready possibility for the child's father, and Ael knew this just as well as Arrhae: the other deep-cover Federation agent among the Empress’s people, a Terran with cosmetic modifications just like Arrhae had. "Thus the need for spectacular stupidity.Q

"It is true that sleeping with your assistant is, perhaps, not the most impeccably honorable of choices, but the Ruling Passion is, after all, passion above all," Ael said. "Are you right with Ffairl over that, at least?"

Arrhae bowed her head, shallowly this time, but enough. "It would make my heart glad if you would have someone speak to him, in confidence, with the power to make things right for him if they are not: but he has made no complaint to me, and he, after all, outranks me in the Fleet. It was only once, and he was the one who plied _me_ with excessive amounts of very good wine."

It had not even been anything great or dramatic. It had been Eitreih'hveinn, the Farmer's Festival for ch'Rihan's northern continents; Farmer Gurri had thrown a lavish party in Ratlei'fi, with the excuse of promoting the produce of the local farms he owned (of which there were a great number and variety.) Anyone of any importance in the capital of ch'Rihan had been invited, and she had spent the evening, and into the morning, turning aside the courtship (both political and personal) of a great many people who thought themselves more important than they were; and encouraging the flirtation of somewhat fewer people who thought themselves somewhat less important than they should be; and saying the things that the Empress wanted said, into ears that needed to hear them, and listening for things that perhaps should not have been said but needed to be passed on to other ears all the more for that.

Far too late she'd caught a flitter back to one of her own sets of quarters, these in a newish housing block near the Senate chambers rather than tr'Khellian's townhouse for nights just such as these, and invited Ffairrl with her, in the idea that they would discuss what information from the party needed to be passed on to whom, and when, and how: or it been Ffairrl's own idea to come back with her? Regardless, very little policy or intelligence had been discussed. He had carried several bottles of wine out of the party, and they had both been exhausted and already halfway tipsy, and Arrhae had kept thinking about another Farmer's Festival, fewer years ago than it seemed it could possibly have been, when she had gone to the market in i-Ramnau to buy _hlai'vnau_ for her master's table, and everything in her life had changed.

Ffairrl had never lost the habit of plying her with excessive food and drink when he had the chance, and she had said yes to rather more wine than she should have, and then more enthusiastically yes to several more things she should not have - her own suggestions as much as his, perhaps more so. It had been one of those encounters she had not had the opportunity for since the Academy, possibly: when you both wanted the same thing, and you both knew you had been wanting it, and you fell together as if neither or both of you had moved first.

But oh! it had been good, and laughing, as the best always was. Arrhae had not been entirely chaste in her time among the Rihannsu; the mission had not required it, and though Intelligence would not have required otherwise if she'd not been so inclined, they had asked her to investigate _every_ aspect of Romulan culture. To start with her private sessions with Vaebn had not been _entirely_ language lessons, and between them they had verified that her cover, and her biomodifications, would hold in nearly every physical situation, as long as she kept always in mind the cultural differences in the ways Rihannsu and Terrans engaged in the act.

After Vaebn “cast her off” she had taken a few more opportunities; being sent undercover into a culture where you read as spectacularly beautiful rather than ‘odd but striking’, as it had been on Earth, had its advantages. But once she’d become _hru’hfe_ in tr’Khellian’s household, and all the more so as a Senator, and then advisor to the Empress, it had not seemed worth either the time or the risk that her cover _would_ fail at just the wrong moment. And not worth the effort of remembering, always, even in the most intimate of moments, to touch as a Rihannsu rather than a Terran.

With Ffairrl she hadn’t needed to. He knew all her secrets, and all the more, shared them. There’d been no need to be either Rihannsu or Terran with him; they could touch as Terrans did, and shiver with the lewdness of it as Rihannsu did, and the freedom had been as intoxicating as the wine. Breathlessly laughing as they touched hands, laughing at the innocence of it and breathless at the intimacy; thrilling at the depravity of a kiss and the familiarity of it, at once. 

It hadn’t been awkward in the morning, though he had tried to feed her far too much breakfast, but it hadn’t happened again. She wasn’t certain she wanted it to; and she thought he felt approximately the same. A passion and a joy it had been, not something to regret or to poison a friendship, but not something to shape one’s life around.

And then this.

Ael raised an eyebrow. “I have been tempted to say something about how Ffairl needs to get over his need to stuff you full at every opportunity, but there is simply no way of saying that here which does not sound entirely inappropriate.”

Arrhae choked on a laugh.

“Are you certain you’ve caught?” Ael asked then.

Arrhae nodded. “I have a padd that will do basic medical scanning for a Terran, enough to confirm that, at least. But it won’t do any of the prenatal care that’s usual, and Ael, even if the modifications hold through a pregnancy - and they weren’t designed for it - they would not hold on an infant, even if you could find a doctor who would consent to try. And any doctor who would do that to an infant I would not trust with my child.”

“So,” Ael said with a breath. “What, then, do you want to do?”

Arrhae took a breath. Something she had been thinking about, far in the back of her mind, for a long time: and that had been running through the front of her mind, endlessly looping, since the padd had confirmed it for her last night. “ _Llei’hmne_ , I don’t know. I have always wanted children; and in recent years I have dreamed of a child of mine who could be Rihannsu and Terran both, as Spock is of two worlds- except less of a mess,” she added with a smile, “because no Vulcans would be involved in the raising of them. But I can’t see a path to it from here, not in the time I would have. There are medicines that would end it quickly, this early- none easy to find in the Empire, but one could be sent with the diplomatic packages easily enough.”

“You could have requested that without coming to me,” Ael said. “You and Makkhoi pass strange intoxicants between each other often enough that it would go unremarked. But you did anyway. Do you _want_ to request the medication?”

Commander Haleakala of Starfleet gripped her hands tightly together. “I want it more than I want to give up Arrhae t'llhweiir and go back to Earth,” she said, “and I see no other way.”

Ael picked up one of the padds scattered over her desk, and brought something up. “What do you know of _rrh-thanai_?” she asked.

“Hostage-fostering?” she said, and shook her head. “Only a little, though it shows up often enough in the historical dramas. Giving your children into an enemy’s care, or an ally’s, as a promise of peace. Sometimes as a hostage in truth, held against the breaking of the peace. Sometimes as a way of binding your peoples together in family as well as treaties. Most often both at once, one way or another. Many cultures on Earth had something similar, in parts of their histories; so did Andoria and Orundwiir and many others.”

“So did Vulcan, I understand,” Ael said. “They’ve recently acquired a somewhat more anti-isolationist government.”

“I had heard about the independence referendum,” Arrhae agreed, not sure where Ael was going with this, but with a thin thread of hope growing in her belly.

“Had you heard that it was all the strategy of an ex-lover of Spock’s, who was irritated that he didn’t want to marry her?” Ael snorted. “If that rumor’s true, I should very much like to meet her, I think.” She glanced down at her padd again. “I have just today received a message from the new Head of Surak’s House. It seems there are those on Vulcan who consider the loan of Surak’s Sword to us as something in the nature of hostage-fostering. And the Lady Amanda wonders, now, if it would be possible for the Sword of S’task to go on exchange to Vulcan in its turn, to share its history and its story, perhaps to the benefit of both our peoples.” She tapped the padd thoughtfully. “If the Sword went, it would have to be Enterprise, for I am not putting it in the hands of anyone but Spock. And it would have to go accompanied, by Rihannsu with rank enough to do it honor and wisdom enough to do its story justice. But it does occur to me that if a delegation went out into the Federation with the Sword - or perhaps even before it, to negotiate; it might take months for even the preliminary negotiations, for nobody here is eager for it to go roaming again - it would be possible that perhaps they could bring back a Federation child, to be raised here in Ratle’ifi by a Rihannsu foster-mother. Perhaps several; perhaps the start of a long-running exchange between our peoples. But perhaps only one, to start, that they stumbled on unplanned and unrequested. The child of a deep-cover intelligence operative, perhaps, who could not raise it herself, but wanted it to serve her peoples as she does, and Starfleet sentimental enough to pass us the request.”

Arrhae took a deep breath. “Empress,” she said.

“If you did this,” Ael said, “You could not be its foster-mother. Neither _mnhei’sahe_ nor pragmatics would allow it.”

“That those two so often correspond, in your Empire, is only to your credit,” Arrhae said. She could see that future spilling out in front of her, suddenly: a child she would bear, but could keep only long enough, perhaps, to nurse for a few weeks, and then given to a family - probably to a Senator or Praetor who was firmly in Ael’s pro-Federation party, so she would see them, often enough - but could never give a hint the child was hers, and who would suspect it, thoroughly Rihannsu as she was? And it would be the child she had dreamed of, the child of peace between two worlds - just not hers. Mnhei’sahe said that if she were to ask other parents to give up their children to peace, she could not do otherwise with hers; that sort of too-easy lie at the start would poison the entire undertaking, and she was Arrhae enough to believe it true. And pragmatics said that if her secret was revealed - and it would have to be, someday; with luck it would hold past her child’s minority, but every day she stayed a Senator and a Lantern, she risked discovery - when all the Empire's newschannels blared that she was a Federation agent, a nefarious Terran in disguise - then the hostage child would be, at least, a defense enough to keep Ael and her party from going down with her. It would let them say, perhaps she _was_ an agent of Them, from There, but she is ours, now, and she has _been_ ours. It would not even been entirely wrong, not as wrong as it should have been, for Commander Haleakala to claim she had held to her Starfleet oaths.

“It will hurt,” Ael said. “To be a parent always hurts, eventually: but to watch your child claimed by others, and not be able to go to them - that will be its own kind of pain.”

“Yes,” Arrhae said, “But I think - I think it would be a pain worth the bearing. It would be _mnhei’sahe_. And at least I need not fear that the foster parent would be poorly chosen.”

“Yes,” Ael agreed. Arrhae wondered if she was thinking of her own son, the son lost to his own _mnhei’sahe_ in the most painful of ways, and everything else she had lost to that. “I would need to ask of you two more things, if you want this. The first I should have asked of you already, but I could not afford to lose you. But if you wish to keep serving me, as Senator, and as the Empress’s Lantern - you cannot also serve Starfleet. I wish it were so, I wish I should never have to ask this, but you cannot stay strung between us for very much longer, and not at all, if you are deciding for your child as well. And so you have a choice. You can go out on a mission to the Federation, and there Senator t’Ilhweiir will die, of some minor illness that the lloann'mhrahel cannot treat -and you will be Commander Haleakala only, and you can never come back among the Rihannsu, where you’ll be recognized. Or you will go out on a mission to the Federation, and tell them there that you wish to resign your commission, and come back to ch’Rihan and your work here. I do not think they will refuse you, because you are of more value to them as my advisor than as an agent. And I will not ask you to oppose them directly - unless the situation becomes desperate enough that I must, and all oaths are breaking. But it is not an easy thing I ask of you, and I do not want you do decide in haste.” She paused, and then added, "Although perhaps do not wait too long, for if we have to fake your death, it will have to be on a ship where Makkhoi is not running sickbay, or neither of us will hear the end of it.

Arrhae swallowed. It was something she, too, knew could not hang undecided forever. Perhaps as a minor functionary or a backbench senator she could have stayed a Federation agent, with the Empress's knowledge and tacit approval - _mhei’sahe_ allowed for spy networks to exist - but not as an advisor to an Empress whose place would always be vulnerable, whose balance atop the politics of the Rihannsu would always be treacherous. She had been hoping, perhaps, that the sort of miracle Ael and Kirk managed on a monthly basis would let her stay as she was, forever - but it had never been an honest hope.

Whatever scandal happened when her secrets came out, it would be all the worse if she was still under oath to the Federation.

She loved ch’Rihan, and she loved her people here, and the culture and ways of thinking she had been immersed in for ten years, and the project that Ael had begun, that would not even begin to be complete in a Rihannsu lifespan - but she was a Starfleet officer, too, and loved that no less, and that had its own sort of _mnhei’sahe_... and in ten years undercover, she had not found an answer, not one to hold the rest of her life.

“Empress, you honor me in the asking,” she said, at last. “I will try to honor you in the answering as well.”

“Good,” Ael said. “And the second thing - if you do stay with us, you need to get married.”

Arrhae shot her head up. “What?”

"And it needs to be a Rihannsu - someone of good standing and useful politics, preferably. I know you prefer to remain unpartnered for a time, but if you are going to spend so much time among Terrans, the people need a reassurance that you have roots here. Also," she added with a mischeievous flicker of a smile, "Clearly we need to get you settled down, to prevent this from happening again," with a vague gesture in the direction of her belly.

At _that_ , of all things, Arrhae blushed. "I have not been thinking about marriage at all. Honestly."

"Well, think on it now," Ael said. "It needn't be immediate, though it would be useful to have some house connected to you, at least in expectations, before you leave ch'Rihan again. And it will need to be someone who can be trusted with our secrets, so we will need time. If you truly cannot think of anyone you could make a match with, I have in on good authority that H'daen would acquiese, if only in the faint hope of having you to manage his household again."

Arrhae chocked. H'daen? It would, she supposed, be a marriage in name only - Tr'Khellian's complete lack of sexual interest in women was widely known, and certainly he'd made no effort to hide it from the staff - but no, she could not imagine herself agreeing to that, even with a total lack of other possibilities.

"No?" Ael said, still smirking. "If not him, I think tr'Kaveth has a granddaughter who might suit."

"I think I can manage that part of the affair myself, llei'hmne."

"Excellent," Ael said. "Then I think this is well-managed. You have - what, perhaps six months?"

"At most, though it will be difficult to hide well before that."

"Less than six months, then," she said, "To convince the senate to pass and fund your idea for a hostage-fostering program with the Federation."

"What?" Arrhae said.

"Did you think I would be doing all the work, to solve your problem?" Ael asked. "No, I think it is time and past you took lead on a legislative project of you own, and this one will do very well. I leave the details to you, I think - I will pass you the Lady Amanda's contact, as a start." Which was fair enough, Arrhae though to herself later. She had been a Senator in a time of unrest, and a time of war, and a time of rebuilding, but she'd acted as a spy, an agent of others, and an adviser. It _was_ past time she started to learn the legislative work that was meant to be the real task of one in her position, for they were trying to build a government it which that would be the main work of Senators again. And certainly Arrhae would have the motivation to do the job well. But in the moment, with the inexorable deadline of biology stretching before her, and the webworks and strategies she would need to push something like this through the Senate stretching before her - it was all she could do to "Madam" the Empress again, and bow her way out.

**Afterword**

When my notes on Rihannsu culture were first published, I spoke with hope of a future in which our children could grow up among each other, and come back to teach their elders the things only children can learn well. Now, many years later, I can start to see that happening - I can see the children of Romulan Senators, educated at the Vulcan Science Academy, or Oxford University on Earth, or the Cultural Center of Hamal, come back to Ra'tleihfi to see their own world again in new eyes, and the children of the Federation come here to learn as well, and go home wreak changes on it the way all young people wreak changes in their worlds (the way I did, when I also was too young to know better on ch'Rihan.) And to see the first generation of the children who were fostered from childhood on other worlds begin to grow up- a practice that has always been controversial, and I hope it never becomes less. The giving up of children cannot be easy. But I can say at least that I have lived it - my own son was fostered by a ship-clan family on ch'Havran (and that there are enough Terran children on ch'Havran now that I can publish that much without putting him at risk is its own victory.)

I see him a few times a year, at most. Perhaps for festivals, with the excuse that I know his foster-parents. He is growing, as all children do, into a person both stronger and wiser than his parents. He speaks Rihannsu and English both perfectly, though his English has a Rihannsu accent and his Rihannsu a Havransu one, and he switches between them without thinking, and teaches me new aspects of mnhei'sahe every time I see him - but that is also something that all children teach their parents, if their parents are willing to learn.

He is also old enough, now, to ask the strange lady who comes to visit sometimes, and goes riding among the _hlai_ with him, and tells him about Earth where he was born and the people of the Federation who are eager to welcome him back, "But _why_ do I have to be Federation and Rihannsu both? Why can't I be just one thing?"

I have my own foster-children of course, my husband and I: Rihannsu and Terran both. They, too, are strong and brave, and every day learning things I never knew I needed to be taught. They will be old enough to ask soon.

I have no answer for them. What parent ever has? And I am not just one thing any more either - if I ever was. Hawaiian and Italian, and then Terran and Starfleet, and then Starfleet and Rihannsu. I would not have had his answers for him, even if I had been given the gift of his raising. _rr'Thanai_ , in the old world of the Rihannsu, was not meant as a kindness, though often enough it ended in it. We have tried to build this new system in kindness, in openness, and in hope; and for the children we have forced those hopes onto, all I can answer is "You do need to be just one thing, yourself." It is a hard thing to be, when you were swaddled in the hopes of Empires as a child.

The great Havrannsu historian Lai tr'Ehhelih, was obsessed with beginnings, as many Rihannsu have been, all the way back to S'task. tr'Ehhelih was bitter and angry as well, at least in the books he's best remembered for, and the ones he was killed for. In his early years he wrote erotic poetry, which is even harder to find than his histories, but treasured all the more by the ones who know it. It shows us a man who became bitter and betrayed as only one who had once loved wholly and deeply and innocently could do. 

We don't know what he would have written in his old age, because they killed him. Perhaps he would have fallen silent, as S'task did. Perhaps he would have found a voice again, like the nature lyrics of tr'Khellian that have recently become popular in and around i-Ramnau.

Perhaps that is the only other answer I can offer to the children who run and play around me, as I write this for the first edition of my reports to be published for a Rihannsu audience. That I want the universe to see what they will create in their old age.  
And that I want us to make them a world where they can.

Terise Haleakala-LoBrutto


End file.
